Ah, a summer road trip. There’s nothing quite like it, right? One hassle can be planning your vacation road trip. How do you decide the best places to stop? How much driving is too much in one day? We’ve compiled several great vacation road trip planners to help you plan that trip with ease! Plus, knowing your itinerary before hand means you can provide that information to someone in case of an emergency. You can also be proactive in thinking about emergencies or situations you might encounter along the way. For instance, if you’re traveling through the desert in monsoon season, you’ll want to think about flash floods. Planning to be in California? You might need to think about earthquakes or wildfires. Knowing all the aspects (or as many as possible) of your trip beforehand can take away much of the stress and make that vacation road trip pure fun!
Rand McNally Trip Maker
Rand McNally’s Trip Maker is interesting because it lets you add rest areas, quirky and oddball stops, and even State Parks and Campgrounds to your route. You can add stops, and the program calculates for you the distance and approximate amount of time it will take from stop to stop. This can be a great way to start planning your trip as you can see the entire route and then start adding in places along the way.
Roadtrippers.com
Roadtrippers is similar to the Rand McNally site, but it’s more specific. So you can add just campgrounds to your trip, or look for points of interest related to literature or architecture instead of ALL points of interest along the way. There’s a “plus” version that includes offline maps and live road condition updates too. It even can estimate how much you’ll spend on gas!
10 Useful Tools and Apps
Finally, this website has a list of to help you with your road trip planning. From ways to save on gas to notifications about upcoming road blocks or other conditions, this site covers it all!